


while we're young

by Hyb



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, M/M, Post-Canon, a day in the life of the insufferable soulmates, it takes two incurable romantics to tango, metaphysical noodling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:20:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25512706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/Hyb
Summary: He knows what Genoa does to Nicky.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 104
Kudos: 848





	while we're young

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stonecarved (figure8)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/figure8/gifts).



> The basic premise here is that it seemed to me after (three times..) viewing the movie that Joe is wearing a ring in Goussainville that disappears afterward. Now here we are. <3 More notes on language and sources at the end.
> 
> This has to be for Len, of course. Thank you for letting me absorb so much from your head canons and general knowledge, including a shared history for Joe so specific that I simply wouldn't know any other way now. Thank you for your friendship, most of all. I am bad with declarations; you deserve the world.

“You’re going alone?” Nile blinks over her coffee in surprise. Andy filches the chifferi cookies from her saucer with a pickpocket’s deft hand.

Nicky passes Nile his own, unprompted, and only then does she seem to reconstruct the sequence of events. She whacks Andy in the shoulder, but lightly. Careful. They’re always careful with Andy now.

“We aren’t very good company, in Genoa,” Joe offers.

“No, you’re not,” Andy agrees, not unkindly. Her love tastes of metal; it is an edged thing, moreso in moments of quiet than not. Like it cuts her. “Go away.”

  
  


In a street market of flapping striped awnings he bites into a pear so sublime it wets his chin, juices running down his palm to his wrist. 

Nicky is lingering in the shade of a stall, beckoning him closer. “Do you like this ring?” he asks with a focused intensity. Silver with an aged patina, the flattened face etched with a star, the suggestion of waves.

 _For you or for me?_ Joe responds in dated Ligurian and Nicky studies his face as if they were alone. This is a dialect only he knows: Nicolò and his glances, his sighs, the eloquence when he says nothing at all. “Pretty,” he allows.

“Yes,” Nicky agrees, eyes creasing with his grin. 

“For the one you lost,” he murmurs before he pays. Tests the fit on his own hand out of habit, their size the same as if they were cast from a single mold. And he did lose it, in the lab. He wasn’t awake for that bit, any more than when they peeled off his shirt and bit away little pieces of his insides. They lose things constantly, clothes most of all. But in time they find them again — new talismans. 

The sun is at his back and Nicky is in cool shadows, lips moving as he studies the ring. _Itri_ , he shapes, thumb touching the design. _Tufut_. Like a child, though he’s more fluent than that. But these are among the first words he taught Nicky because he wanted to hear them spoken again. The first words he taught him on purpose.

  
  


He knows what Genoa does to Nicky. Always it is like this; like he is restless for the city to remember Joe, to welcome him home like a lost son. Once Nicky tried to write a song about it, after too much red wine, something of soil and green growing things and making love in the fields like planting a tree, like there should be a monument to Joe rooted here. Regard Yusuf al-Kaysani, fashioned by God and given to me by grace. Make a place for him, call him son and call him beloved. But he got flustered halfway and clapped his hand over the strings of the mandolin and never finished it despite all his plying kisses and encouragement.

  
  


Joe washes his hands under a pump in the street, placed there by people who were children to Nicky and infants to Andy. Metal aged green over its acanthus leaves and a pine cone, or something, as its finial. Booker would know, he can rattle off the details, the symbols and flaws that mark a thing as real or fake. 

It stills his breath, for a moment. He doesn’t regret it. He refuses to regret. You can ask him, he thinks sourly, in one hundred years. He nearly called out his name in Beirut, when they were all flanking Andy and pivoting to catch bullets headed her way. Nile is an exquisite shot but she doesn’t move with them like one animal yet.

But she doesn’t lie, either.

The sun is warm in his hair and Nicky’s palm is warm on his back, flattened between his shoulder blades. No weight to it. Leaning up close behind him like a shadow, or a promise.

“Do you know where we are?”

Nicky hums and doesn’t lift his head to inspect the paving stones laid centuries after everyone who ever knew him as a priest was buried. “Too far from the harbor to tell.” 

“So you never stole anything here? This is a cheap tour.” He likes those stories best, the years that make Nicky smile in retelling. He never had an eye for art then, but he and the other wild orphans he ran with could paint a cheap knock-off and beat it with chains until it look aged, then sell it to eager foreign merchants in the port. 

“Not cheap,” Nicky murmurs, and takes up his right hand, wrapping it in the hem of his own shirt until dry. “My fees will be significant.” His mouth opens in a warm and welcome shock beneath Joe’s ear, so brazen he could almost miss the ring eased onto his finger. 

Shaded from the high sun, Nicky’s eyes are dark. Always Genoa, he thinks.

“That sounds like an indecent proposition. What kind of man do you think I am?” he tuts disapprovingly.

Nicky squeezes his hand too tight. “Mine,” he breathes out, and kisses him.

The street is empty, a laneway winding between rows of old buildings, the noon sun slicing down onto their shoulders. The dry, deliberate cough comes from above when he has Nicky’s lip caught between his teeth, Nicky’s fingertips dipping to the notches of his spine below his belt. A woman with gray hair streaked in white, leaning from her window to dump out a bowl of scraps for the dogs or the birds. She withdraws her hand behind the red painted bars and continues to scowl down at them. At _him_. He knows the difference.

“ _Signora_ ,” he calls up with deliberate brightness. He twists his hand to hold Nicky fast by the wrist, like an anchor. So near, he can feel the breath he draws in. Holds. Releases slowly, like a sigh. He knows his thoughts as if they were his own, watches them unspool to their inevitable conclusion. He is thinking that this woman is aged in ways they will never be, not even at the end of it all. How long before they walk these streets again she will be dead, and maybe her children as well. He thinks, perhaps, that sometimes a solitary lifetime is insufficient to shake the fear of strangers from your heart like ash and recognize God in every soul you meet.

“God bless you,” Nicky tells her, and there is no irony in it.

  
  


They do not stop for lunch. 

Heat glows in him when Nicky changes direction, cutting sharply toward the small hotel with its teal shutters and matching trompe l’oeil windows overlooking a fountain. “It is broad daylight,” he laughs for the knowing shine in Nicky’s eyes that answers him. “Really, a man of your age?”

“ _Non vedo l’ora_ ,” he complains back.

This is how Nicky makes love in Genoa — and Nicky always, always makes love to him in Genoa. Deliberately. Ferociously, sometimes. It is not so much words, with Nicky. He struggles even now. When they began to speak of such things, in Cyprus, before Andy and Quynh found them — he talked of God like a great silence. Like a presence felt as behind a curtain, watchful, offering no answers. You went to war for that? Joe had marveled, anger like an ember blackened but still beating red at its heart. 

And you? Nicolò had asked, made his jaw a firm patient line. In their shared vernacular he tried to make him understand — God in the rain, in the air on his skin, in a kiss. 

In a kiss, balanced over Nicky’s thighs with the windows thrown open to bright day. 

In Tunis it is not quite like this. He could not show him the university as it was in Baghdad, when all the world seemed gathered together by an irresistible tide and every day he met beautiful, clever strangers with new stories to tell from places he had never seen. But in Tunis he can say, here my mother let me balance the books and here I learned how to swim. Here, I am certain it was here, I danced for my dearest friend’s wedding. Joe always remembers poems there he had thought long forgotten. 

Nicky is quiet there, watchful. He walks softly, as in a church. 

When morning shimmers on pale rooftops stretching out to the harbor, Joe might say to him I could have taught you about kissing here. It's impossible, but everything they are to one another is impossible. He does not feel regret for Nicolò and the men like him, men who might have traded hemp and hunting birds for wool and fine carpets one year and the next crowded into their boats to murder strangers. But he feels a sliver, always, for Nicolò the boy who watched his friends knifed and hung and drowned and carted away to labor for what they had stolen. That boy, and perhaps the man who looked more frightened when Joe kissed him than when he cut his throat.

It wasn’t so much the kissing, before you, Nicky confessed a very long time ago. So long, but decades after the first time. He should have guessed as much. Nicolò, stranger, murderer. His hands were hard and certain where they sought Joe's body but he faltered when he kissed his cheeks, breathed uncertainly against his lips like a trapped animal.

His hands are certain now, and warm. 

  
  


“Sing me my song,” he smiles into his kiss, and Nicky’s eyes cross in vexation. 

“Yusuf,” he protests, and stings his collarbones with a wreath of biting kisses. “Do not make me laugh.” It is one of his favorite phrases in the lexicon that is Nicky, after _dear heart_ and _I dreamed of you,_ the latter with a flush after all this time. _Do not make me laugh,_ with his arrow nocked, with his steady hands on a rifle, gusting out stuttered, half suppressed mirth through his nose. 

His steady hands relearning skin, knuckles turned against Joe’s cheek, palms mapping the length of his back, untorn and unbruised and unwounded once again. The red marks Nicky loves into his chest will fade and fast, but they still bloom like molten silver in his mind’s eye. He has always been drawn to talismans in silver. Warding against the wound that does not close. The body that grows cold. His ring is warm against his skin, now, warm where he caresses Nicky's nape. Joe will need to cut his hair for him soon.

“You won’t even hum for me?” he chides, sighing in pleasant frustration as Nicky thumbs the crease of his thigh in maddening circles. "Such a cruel man. No one can imagine the trials I endure."

He begins to lose the thread, swimming in heat up to his eyeballs. He loves Nicky slow and unhurried and he loves Nicky in his mind’s eye, bright as silver, turning back from the sea in Cyprus with the rain running into his face and the most thunderstruck expression. As if he had glimpsed something of terror and elation but he needed Joe to say the words and make it real. He loves Nicky desperate, like this, pinning his knee up to his chest and biting his thigh and pressing him open too fast. He loves how Nicky only ever curses in bed, with reverence. 

“Talk to me,” he stops him with a palm over his sternum before Nicky can breach him. Grins and he is answered with a most martyred sound, plaintive eyes like sea glass. 

But Nicky settles his weight onto one forearm, drops his head until their brows meet. “So long as the story of love and lovers adorns this world,” he recites, “my name shall be written boldly in the book of love.” It is a shiver, a thrill. The corner of Nicky’s mouth hooks up in agreement. These lines had never been translated into Italian, when Nicky learned them. And so he did it himself, in what he then called Florentine, huffing _you always have the advantage of me, Yusuf, now let me read._

Joe hooks a knee wide against his side and welcomes him home. They do not move, not yet. The air is hot with their nearness, clean like lemon and bleach and yet a lifetime removed from the hushed sick dread of the lab. The fear of cages, fear they might be hidden from one another. Fears they refuse to name. All that desperation now distilled into the sudden hoarseness of Nicky’s voice. The trembling of his lashes when Joe holds his face and kisses his cheeks like the first time, like a thousand times since. “In this world, my love is the reason for goodness,” he prays. “Since He is the reason for goodness, I became the goodness of love.”

“Romantic,” he murmurs, trapped in stillness like amber despite the pleasure aching in the cradle of his hips. The need to feel Nicky deeper, like a bruise. He might cry, he thinks in surprise. Warm, joyous. Nicky is nearly there.

Nicky clasps his wrist and turns his lips to the new ring, where the silver meets his skin.

“O friend, I want your sustenance,” he grins with his bright eyes, pearls poised to spill over his lashes. Wolfish, supplicant, rapt when Joe pulls him closer and says now, _omri_ , be here with me now, show me. “O beloved, I want to serve and obey.”

  
  
  
  


_My heart had disparate desires  
_ _But the eye of the Beloved made them one._

\- Mansur Hallaj

**Author's Note:**

> Is this sappy, yes. But it's worth the sentiment, I think — for two people to find each other, and have faith in each other that sustains centuries. I love them very, very much.
> 
> If you're so inclined, I'm on Tumblr as h-yb
> 
> Update: It turns out Joe _does_ still have his ring, at least in the final scenes at Merrick. But the fic is written, and as a bonus we get to look at this gorgeous Siken inspired gifset [here](https://h-yb.tumblr.com/post/624937639871676416/joeandnicky-richard-siken)
> 
> Languages: While the Amazigh languages of Tunisia have not been as well preserved as in other areas (1), I wanted to try and be as reflective as possible of what Joe might have spoken growing up when he did. Comical hours of Google tabbing later, my best and most confident estimation (thank you Len) is that of the Zenati languages (2) he might have spoken Djerbi at home (3). 
> 
> (1) https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/b/Berber_languages.htm  
> (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Zenati_languages  
> (3) https://ia600304.us.archive.org/16/items/rosettaproject_jbn_swadesh-1/jbn.txt
> 
> The focus on Sufi mystical poetry is a nod in part to what Joe's relationship with religion might have been, growing up with both Islam and prior animism. For his fluency and education, this felt like a natural extension of his worldview. All excerpts are from the collection Islamic Mystical Poetry, translated by Mahmood Jamal (4). Nicky recites verses by Sanai Ghaznavi - Love's Command and Invocation, specifically. Reference to the dearth of Persian translation to Italian here (5)
> 
> (4) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/306742/islamic-mystical-poetry-by-mahmood-jamal/  
> (5) https://iranicaonline.org/articles/italy-xi-translations-of-persian-works-into-italian-2

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] while we're young](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26570974) by [sallysparrow017](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sallysparrow017/pseuds/sallysparrow017)




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